I don't need to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America. And it's man-made. Over the last 30 years a disciplined, well-funded and closely-coordinated coalition of corporate elites, power-hungry religious conservatives, and hard-line right-wing operatives has mounted an aggressive drive to dismantle the public foundations and philosophy of shared prosperity and fairness in America.

It's all right there in bold letters in the early manifestos of the Reagan Revolution - essential reading like William Simon's A Time for Truth . He argued that "funds generated by business" would have to "rush by multimillions" into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the "heretical" morality of the New Deal. An "alliance" between right-wing leaders and "men of action in the capitalist world" must mount a "veritable crusade" against everything brought forth by the Progressive era. Reading right out of the new reactionary playbook, the business press somberly concluded that "some people will obviously have to do with less … It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more," BusinessWeek sermonized.

They succeeded beyond expectations. Instead of trying to keep a level playing field, government now favors the rich, powerful, and privileged. The public institutions, the laws and regulations, the ideas, norms, and beliefs which aimed to protect the common good and helped to create America's iconic middle class, are now gone, greatly weakened, or increasingly vulnerable to attack. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow sums it up succinctly: What it's all about, he says, "is the redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful."